Etcher stuck on "Starting"

balenaEtcher
1

Hi. I’m using Etcher 1.5.19. I’m able to select my image and the drive, but when I press “Flash”, the button changes to “Starting” and does nothing else. My spidey sense tells me it might be waiting for admin permissions, but they are never requested. Does anyone know what’s going on?

Thanks in advance.

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Hey @emarthinsen welcome to the forums. Your spidey sense is probably correct on this! What platform are you running on? If Windows you could right click on the app and launch it with admin permissions and see what happens.

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Doh, I forgot to mention that crucial piece of information. I’m running Ubuntu 18.04.

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@emarthinsen do you see anything in the logs (ctrl +shift +i then go to the ‘console’ tab)?
You may be able to work around that by running etcher with sudo balena-etcher-electron.

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I’m also having the same issue but on Windows 10. I have tried to run it as admin but with the same result.

Here are the logs:
1554837898633.log (8.3 KB)

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Hi @etricky , welcome to the balena forums.
There has been an issue with supervisor rights but it was fixed a while ago.
I will have to talk to the etcher team to see what might cause your problem…
Regards
Thomas

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@samothx Just to let you know that I installed an older version, 1.5.18, and I’m able to use Etcher just fine.

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It was never fixed. Even when the changelog said it was fixed, it still hung… except back then there was the CLI that always worked reliably. Now that you’ve removed the CLI, I’m back to fighting “Starting”.

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I have a similar problem. I read a post which said that using version 1.2 solved that users problem and I’m trying to find it again and also how to download version 1.2.

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hey @yorgg75, I see that you posted a follow-up to this on My Etcher claims 1.5.5, hope the latest Etcher version will fix your issue, and let’s continue the discussion there, probably. Thanks!

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I am having a similar issue. I am running version 1.5.53 on Ubuntu 18.04. Etcher has been progressively slower and slower in launching, taking upto to 3 minutes. It is a little quicker if I do not have any sdcard or USB plugged in. But it is still much much slower than when I first installed it.

Thanks.

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Hi, does the behaviour persist if you reinstall the same version? If so, can you try with a later version like 1.5.70 ?

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Having the same problem on Manjaro, I’ve installed the tool via the AUR and running version 1.5.7.0

It does ask for my admin password after I click on start but it hangs on “Starting” after that

Nothing strange on the logs either, here are the last 2 lines from it:

Flashing 1 devices, 0% at 0 MB/s (total 0 MB/s) eta in undefineds with 0 failed devices
Open external link ({"url":"https://github.com/balena-io/etcher/blob/master/SUPPORT.md","applicationSessionUuid":"cb51bae5-37da-41dd-a079-f22cbb8b423e","sample":0.1})
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Hey @ferares, could you please start Etcher with sudo and try again?

It’d be good to check if that makes any difference here.

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My problem might have been my card reader or the microSD to full size SD adapter I was using, tried again on another PC with Manjaro and the same version of etcher and it worked fine. Thanks for replying though :slight_smile: I love this tool

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Hi @ferares

Glad to hear your problem has been resolved!

Kind regards
Alida

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Hi @stampeder

Referring to the message that my colleague sent you on Jan 2nd:

Hi, does the behaviour persist if you reinstall the same version? If so, can you try with a later version like 1.5.70 ?

I just want to follow up and ask whether you have tried this yet, and if so, whether Etcher launches promptly now?

Kind regards
Alida

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Hey guys, still here??

I’ve stuck in same case.
And I found a solution :slight_smile:

In my case, I formatted first with another format application.

this is the link. good luck~
https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter/eula_windows/index.html

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Hello PharosEye, welcome to the forums and thanks for reaching out!
Can you clarify what was the issue/case you were stuck on? Just so we are sure since this thread has grown quite a bit :slight_smile:

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At risk of chiming in with a “Me Too!”, here’s my experience with this error.

Note that this is all done in Win-10 Pro, 64bit fully upgraded on a HP Elitebook 8570p, fully tricked out.

  • If I use the built-in J-Micron SD card port, it works fine.
  • If I use a USB => universal card reader, it works about 75% of the time.
    Though in some cases, it appears to copy and verify correctly, but the image is still garbage.  I suspect that the positions of planets, stars, and the phase of the Moon may have a significant effect.
  • If I use a small USB/microSD “dongle” adapter, it hangs on the “Starting” message.

This is true despite the fact that the microSD adapter and universal card reader work flawlessly for anything else I might want them to do.

I have not had enough free time to seriously troubleshoot this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the system USB drivers may be at fault here since Etcher copying to a USB drive is also fraught with danger.  YUMI, by comparison, works flawlessly - but YUMI is primarily a file-copier using the high-level OS calls to the partitions, not a RAW write to the device - which is what I suspect Etcher does.